Environmental benchmarks for buildings : EFIResources : resource efficient construction towards sustainable design

The research project EFIResources: Resource Efficient Construction towards Sustainable Design, supports European policies related to the efficient use of resources in construction and its major goal is the development of a performance based approach for sustainable design, enabling to assess resource efficiency of buildings in the early stages of building design. In the proposed approach for sustainability design, the performance of a building, focussing on resource use, is benchmarked against standard and/or best practices. Therefore, benchmarks for the environmental performance of buildings are developed, providing a consistent and transparent yardstick for the assessment of the environmental performance of buildings and striving towards an effective reduction of the use of resources and relative environmental impacts in the building sector. This report focusses on the framework for the development of benchmarks for the life cycle performance of buildings and provides a preliminary set of benchmarks for residential buildings, which may be considered to be representative of the existing residential building stock in Europe.